Breaking the Heart of the Universe

[daMoose_Neo]

And its not my intent to diss Traveler ^_^ Just about all games serve a purpose and even the worst offenders on Ron's original heartbreaker list have a small but existing fan base.

I'm saying there ought to be a distinction made as to whether a game is Science Fiction or Science Fantasy and define the Heartbreaker qualities from there.
Traveler may be up on technology and explaing how and why things work and tackle some challengeing, realistic designs, but gadgets doth not sci-fi make. I've gone through quite a bit of trouble to explain Mages in my game "Final Twilight", jumping into some rudementary genetics, heredity, and such. On one hand, it could fall along the lines of X-Men, genetic mutants, on another its quite similar to traditional sorcery. Tis still fantasy, however. Just because I explained it away with genetics and technical terms doesn't make it any closer to Science Fiction.
Just basically- No amount of technical detail can be used to explain S.Fantasy as S.Fiction.

So, I'd propose a new question/qualification at the top of the list for Science Heartbreakers:
1) A game, otherwise better suited to S.Fantasy, which presents itself as Science Fiction while in-sysetm avoiding the "What if?" of S.Fiction (or something worded better).

We can appreciate S.Fantasy as S.Fantasy. Star Wars is an awesome movie and awesome stories. I have a shelf full of the novels. Call the Star Wars RPG an "awesome adventure!" and you're right. Even call Traveler as a realistic romp through space and you'd be right (for its time). Try to put it on par with Dicks or Asimov? Nope. If, for whatever reason, someone picked SWRPG up expecting it to hit on issues of humanity, individuality, good of one vs. good of all, socioty vs the individual, etc etc they'd most certainly be heartbroken (not that anyone would unless they lived in a cave and someone just lied through their teeth to this poor purchaser).

Re: Marco's observation
Either I noted the fact, or someone else did elsewhere, that yesterday's science fiction is today's reality. Thats why tech can't be used as a defining factor in determining HB legitimacy. HOW does the game go about approaching subjects? If the focus is on the tech, planetary patterns, etc I'd say it falls more under the realm of the Fantasy yet, because it avoids actually dealing with anything. If it, via system, encouraged tackling issues central to humanity and technology while exchanging jokes with Robby the Robot in artificial gravity, even that is closer to the types of things Dick or Asimov would attempt (though their attempt would be a LOT better, lol)

Bob hit something above with his Campaign notation- Dick and Asimov wrote mostly short stories. These were characters you were introduced to quickly, got to know quickly, and who found themselves in quite unusual, challenging and frightening situations, forcing them and the reader to ask questions. At the end of some of these, the main characters die. Three sessions and you could do a fine job of tackling some form of these short stories. Its a FANTASY concept, again, to try to spend years wandering the depths of space. Classic Trek I'd call an amalgamation of the two concepts- I don't recall seeing any kind of continuing storyline through classic Trek as we did in its later counterpart Deep Space 9, Voyager or even Farscape. It dealt with questions in its "situation in a box" much as an SF Author would tackle a question or concept with a one-use main character. Being a television series, however, Roddenberry couldn't kill off central crew members left and right just because they served his purpose for the one thing. So, it worked out the series complications on a "campaign" style basis, its 5 year mission to explore strange new worlds. Need someone to die, make a stupid decision or have something incredible happen to, call up one of the Red-shirt extras!
(which leads me to another suggestion for this S.Fiction exclusive list...consider pitching the "Situation in a box"? If Sci-fi short stories are the source material, its a common thing for them to handle things as such, doling out only as much information as NEEDED, often creating the "situation in a box")

[John Kim]

So, I'd propose a new question/qualification at the top of the list for Science Heartbreakers:
1) A game, otherwise better suited to S.Fantasy, which presents itself as Science Fiction while in-sysetm avoiding the "What if?" of S.Fiction (or something worded better).

We can appreciate S.Fantasy as S.Fantasy. Star Wars is an awesome movie and awesome stories. I have a shelf full of the novels. Call the Star Wars RPG an "awesome adventure!" and you're right. Even call Traveler as a realistic romp through space and you'd be right (for its time). Try to put it on par with Dicks or Asimov? Nope. If, for whatever reason, someone picked SWRPG up expecting it to hit on issues of humanity, individuality, good of one vs. good of all, socioty vs the individual, etc etc they'd most certainly be heartbroken (not that anyone would unless they lived in a cave and someone just lied through their teeth to this poor purchaser).

So it seems that your label of "heartbreaker" is based on ignorance and/or one-true-wayism on the part of the purchaser.  i.e. This hypothetical cave-dwelling purchaser apparently has his heart set that any game which has rayguns or spaceships should try to emulate the specific qualities of literary science fiction in the style of Dick and Asimov.  Thus games like Half-Life, Starfarers of Catan, and Traveller are all heartbreakers to him.  

I'll step out on a limb and say that I don't think the label is appropriate.  I would prefer a more descriptive label, like "heartbreaking-to-an-ignorant-and-narrow-minded-cave-dweller".

[Marco]

I think a lot of discussion is still going on debating the merit of some of the big games of sci-fi rather than the actual heartbreakers.  That's all fine but not really on topic.  Traveller, Star Frontiers, Trek, Star Wars, cant be heartbreakers in exactly the way that D&D, Runequest, an Rolemaster are not fantasy heartbreakers.  They all have their own problems and we can discuss the problems with Traveller or D&D  but that should really be done in a different thread.

So back on topic, An interesting phenomenon that I've noticed is how with the sci-fi heartbreakers the elements that draw from previous games tend to be setting material (monoculture aliens, everyone has their own ship,etc)  much more that it was with fantasy which tended to be modelling techniques (hit points, levels, etc.)  I think this relates back to what was expressed earlier, the source material (literature, tv shows, movies) has more emphasis than other gaming sources.

Well, Calids, while it's easy to say that Traveler can't be a heartbreaker--the bulk of my complaint with the analysis applied here is that whatever attributes (outside of their publishers) are applied to 'heartbreakers' the same are applied to the 'original games.'

If SFHB's are making the same decisions that SF-NON-HB's are--and those decisions are based on the modeled fiction then what separates the HB from the non-HB.

The followup to the essay suggests its the size of the publisher or someone's assumptions about the amount of RPG-industry knowledge the designer had is what makes the difference.

If being an amateur, coming from a small publishing house, or being naive about the industry results in a game with exactly the same relation to the fiction as one bulit by the bigger players then what exactly is the difference between a SFHB and a NON-SF-HB? If we didn't know the guys making it, or know how successful the game was, then could we tell the difference?

In the original essay it seems there is not one--Traveler makes all the same mistakes as the amateures. Both draw from the same source material and emulate it about as well.

-Marco

[daMoose_Neo]

John- No, not really. If you picked up, say, Alternity, expecting to run Asimov, you'd be disappointed. If you picked it up to run Lucas, well then bravo, you have a lethal, action packed system.
What #1 is proposing is to weed out some of these games. As adventure systems, they probably stand fine on their own and if they are HB's they suffer from mostly the same heartbreaker elements that a fantasy does. I'm saying Science Fiction, because of its difference from High Fantasy or traditional Adventure of any genre, might need an additional qualifier. As we're going down this list, Traveller keeps coming up, defenders pointing to its attention to detail and attempt to realistically portray the technology and the systems, and the trade route/system comes up as well. Those challenging that cite a rather boring system, a "diamond in the rough" syndrome with what works and what doesn't and antiquanted tech. These are fairly general, vauge, and IMO fantasy based arguements, used in analysis of High Fantasy and even Modern Fantasy around here. They don't even come close to nailing anything to do with sci-fi, except for portions dealing with technology, which is a really poor basis, again using Traveller as an example. Odds are my old PC has more processing power than some of the example Traveller tech.
So, if they're being attacked and defended on the same basis as a fantasy heartbreaker, share many of the same elements as fantasy, but are being attacked for NOT being "Science Fiction", I'd say something is wrong. If you're going to critique something, judge an apple as an apple, not a peach. Thus, #1 would try to weed out the actual Fantasy games and judge "science fiction" as science fiction, not fantasy as sci-fi.

[M. J. Young]

One of the things that seems to be duplicated in many games (of all genres) is a design that assumes that extended campaign play with repeat characters ( whether or not they advance in skills/levels) should be the norm.  Is this one of the barriers to "what if?" that some folks see as being essential in some way to science fiction? For that matter, has campaign play as a conceptual model worked its way into the conciousness of fiction writers as well?

I've done a number of sci-fi pieces in Multiverser, and they've come off well. Some of them are simple adventures, even swashbucklers in space. Some are issue oriented (such as the ramifications of teleportation technology to the question of whether man has a spirit or soul, a non-material part).

What makes it work, I think, is that I can completely erase a setting and create a new one fairly easily, so even though I have the same "central character", I can have a completely fresh scenario and supporting cast whenever I want it.

What exactly does extended campaign play emulate, other than the norms of D&D?

It emulates the concept that the life of the beloved central character continues; that his existence is not limited to the boundaries of one short story. This is not just role playing games, and it's not just those plus television plus serials plus comics. Detective fiction does this, as the life of the central detective moves forward, building on what has happened in his past (Agatha Christie's detectives did this to some degree; The Cat Who.... books are very significant in this regard). I don't think that fantasy series do this because they draw from games--Bilbo Baggins ages some and the world changes around him between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, to the point that Gimli son of Gloin is the child of one of Bilbo's former companions and companion of his nephew. Many of us want the story to tell us what happens after that, not merely "they lived happily ever after" or "and nothing worth telling ever happened to them again as long as they lived".

This becomes particularly interesting in the aspect that a character will have changed consequent to his adventures. They learned, they experienced, they grew. The next time they face a choice, they will draw on that to make a better selection.

It's more like life, too. We read at the end of the fairy tale that "they lived happily ever after", and we know that the story is over, but that this doesn't tell us a thing about what they did. What sorts of things happened in their lives after that? The story of my life doesn't seem to end; it constantly brings me to new things. The story of your life probably does the same. The idea that at the end of the story, nothing ever happens to those people again, is silly. If they're still alive, something else will happen to them.

We can appreciate S.Fantasy as S.Fantasy. Star Wars is an awesome movie and awesome stories. I have a shelf full of the novels. Call the Star Wars RPG an "awesome adventure!" and you're right. Even call Traveler as a realistic romp through space and you'd be right (for its time). Try to put it on par with Dicks or Asimov? Nope. If, for whatever reason, someone picked SWRPG up expecting it to hit on issues of humanity, individuality, good of one vs. good of all, socioty vs the individual, etc etc they'd most certainly be heartbroken (not that anyone would unless they lived in a cave and someone just lied through their teeth to this poor purchaser).

I'm not sure what this is saying. Is it saying that science fiction role playing games will be heartbreakers if they fail to produce the depth of issue-related story that great authors create? If that's what it means, then we're right back to the idea that narrativist play is the only valid form of science fiction--and I don't think that this is remotely defensible. Certainly the respected science fiction authors write issue-related stories. These are not the ones that are popular. Star Trek dealt with issues the way a comic book handles them--a subtext to the action story for which the viewers watched. Star Wars was the action story for which the viewers watched. Before that, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were both action adventures set in space. Back to the Future, Terminator, Alien, and (I suspect) Predator are all action adventures based on science fiction themes. Even when the good stories are converted to motion pictures, they are usually popularized by being dressed up as action adventures--Star Troopers, I, Robot. The bulk of sci-fi fandom isn't looking for deep issues. They're looking for action adventures with a futuristic twist.

Sure, there is a core fandom that sees the issues as that which is important, and there have been writers since at least Wells (probably also Verne) for whom these issues are the heart of the story. But I've yet to see a popular rendering of The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which was in any way interested in the issues the originals addressed. The popular science fiction interest does not fall to the great writers, and they are not the definition of the genre.

Science fiction is about setting. It is used as a setting to tell stories. They can be love stories like http://www.mjyoung.net/time/happy.html">Happy Accidents, mysteries like Minority Report, light-heared adventures like Flight of the Navigator, comic adventures like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, comedies like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or The Ice Pirates, thrillers like Alien. It's not required that it deal with issues to be science fiction. It is required that it involve some extrapolation of future technology or science as part of the setting. I've read some Larry Niven, and although I haven't read much and I did enjoy what I read, I never encountered anything that seemed like it had great literary value in this sense. It seemed to be about gadgets and how they might impact our future lives, but as a backdrop for telling stories that might otherwise have happened without the gadgets, just a bit differently.

I keep seeing this recurring idea that science fiction is only the stuff that has literary merit, and I have yet to see anyone on this thread demonstrate that this is not what is meant. A science fiction game does not have to produce such stories to be a good science fiction game. The fact that you want narrativist games and these are not those do not make these heartbreakers. There has to be another basis for that.

--M. J. Young

[Marco]

Those challenging that cite a rather boring system, a "diamond in the rough" syndrome with what works and what doesn't and antiquanted tech. These are fairly general, vauge, and IMO fantasy based arguements, used in analysis of High Fantasy and even Modern Fantasy around here.

Emphasis added: what does that mean (the italicized section)?  I'm not sure what this sentence is refering to.

They don't even come close to nailing anything to do with sci-fi, except for portions dealing with technology, which is a really poor basis, again using Traveller as an example. Odds are my old PC has more processing power than some of the example Traveller tech.

Why is Traveler a bad example of anything 'space-opera' in terms of dealing with technology?

The fact that Traveler didn't predict modern computers doesn't have anything to do with its relevance to Science Fiction. Even with a hard look at the science aspect. In terms of the majority of the source material it was based on, it was providing scientifically accurate computers. If anything, it could be considered not fantastical enough.

Any analysis of science fiction shows that it regularly and quickly gets dated (there are numerous, easily cited examples in just about every popular book or movie. Where exceptions may exist, they are notable).

Is anyone really making the argument that a game which accurately reflects its period's view of the genre is in some way deserving of being called a disappointment?

(note: calling this 'defending Traveler' is, IMO, missing the point. If someone is going to claim Traveler's trade system is boring, I have no objection--that's opinion. If someone is going to claim they don't think that space-opera with naval-type starships is "good sci-fi" I won't argue with that opinion either. When someone claims their opinion is objective analysis I think pointing out that it isn't should be pretty standard procedure for a discussion of how a term may or may not apply).

So, if they're being attacked and defended on the same basis as a fantasy heartbreaker, share many of the same elements as fantasy, but are being attacked for NOT being "Science Fiction", I'd say something is wrong. If you're going to critique something, judge an apple as an apple, not a peach. Thus, #1 would try to weed out the actual Fantasy games and judge "science fiction" as science fiction, not fantasy as sci-fi.

If we are discussing AD&D as a 'fantasy game,' I agree. If we are discussing Star Frontiers as a 'fantasy game' I don't.

The term Science Fiction, despite anyone's pretensions otherwise, has to do with where the book gets shelved in the bookstore. I can see no reason, other than looking for a specific kind of argument (specifically, the kind wherein the speaker gets to explain to the listener what he or she considers worthy science fiction) to look to a more narrow definition.*

If you ask someone what 'Battle Tech' is and they tell you it's a 'science-fictiony sort of thing with giant robots and a fallen far-future empire' I would not believe you were heartbroken when you discovered that it didn't address issues of realistic technology in a soulful manner because the speaker used the term 'science-fictiony.'

-Marco
* and if you are looking for a more definitive term, there are expansions like space-opera, hard and soft science fiction, and speculative fiction that were created to assist in making exactly those divisions.

[daMoose_Neo]

Maybe I'm trying too hard to read something in here that isn't here. Looking at the originator of this thread, the first post is trying to say there is a difference unique enough to Science Fiction games to warrent a different approach than there is to Fantasy games in terms of analysis.
And, IMO, all I'm seeing (alibet interptiting maybe) is a rehash of Ron's original essay, except tackling a specific setting: space (or the "future" in general).
So, what makes science fiction unique from traditional fantasy to warrent such an examination? If all we're discussing is setting (Hard SF vs. Theatrical SF vs. X), are we saying each setting can have a catagory of its own heartbreakers? There has to be SOMETHING that sets it apart, and that, again IMO, is the literature or source material.
Fantasy's are epic, sweeping or especially dramatic stories. The model of traditional sci-fi authors are the short stories that come off more as parables. So, what happens when we have a game that takes the sweeping effects of Fantasy with the backdrop found in Science Fiction? Science Fantasy, or "space opera" (thankee Marco ^_^)

Would I be heartbroken if someone told me Battle Tech was Science Fiction? Not especially, I don't honestly care. I'm looking at the terms in context of this essay. Theres nothing wrong, in my experiance, with Traveller, Battle Tech, Star Wars or any of the aforementioned. What I'm considering is the position of the essay to find something more than setting to give "Science Fiction Heartbreaker" its own standing as opposed to another way to call it a "Fantasy Heartbreaker".

So, if all we're discussing is setting, attention to detail, technical accuracy and inventiveness, (which appears to be a chunk of the discussion) we can drop the whole need for a SFHB concept and apply the same standards as Ron's Fantasy HB. Unless theres something different SF Games need that Fantasy doesn't. In which case, that difference should be #1 at the top of the list of qualifications.

[Kedamono]

I've been looking at this and wondering. Traveller is held-up to be the Ur-game for SFRPGs and that it was different from FRPGs. Hmm, well in a way, it was. It was very different. (This is from memory, as I can't find my Traveller books)

Instead of choosing a class, you chose a career path, one that could be fatal and kill your character before you get to play him. As a result, you could end up with a character who starts out in his thirties or forties. They would also end up as high ranking NCOs or Officers in the Navy or a Merchant Marine or Scout with his own ship.

Increasing a skill was hard, and characters really didn't change much between adventures. Out of the box combat was very abstract for gun combat.

As for the much vaunted "setting" for Traveller, everyone forgets that the Imperium was added on later. The original edition of Traveller had no setting other than this quasi-Asimovian Human-Only Universe.

It was as bare bones as you could get. Just as bare bones as original D&D was.

So in light of this, just about every SFRPG subsequent has a setting, extensive background, as well as having characters that changed from adventure to adventure.

So the POV that SFHBs are based on Traveller is more along the line of "SFHBs ignore how Traveller worked."

[Caldis]

Well, Calids, while it's easy to say that Traveler can't be a heartbreaker--the bulk of my complaint with the analysis applied here is that whatever attributes (outside of their publishers) are applied to 'heartbreakers' the same are applied to the 'original games.'

If SFHB's are making the same decisions that SF-NON-HB's are--and those decisions are based on the modeled fiction then what separates the HB from the non-HB.

Yeah I think you are right in that regard, if someone is trying to model something similar to what the original did then there is no heart break taking place.  However when someone comes up with a really 'cool' idea like The Space Knights of the round Asteroid, where Space Knights ride rocket horses and joust with their Astrolances, but tacks on a system that includes 75 different firearms and 43 different ship designs then some heartbreak is taking place.

Relating it back to the Fantasy heartbreak, D&D modelled something very specific.  Levels and hp's made the game about a journey from a peon who could beat up the occasional orc to a dragon slaying superhero.  That's how the game was designed to be played and there was little that could change it, your first level character would never challenge a dragon at 15th level you would never have trouble facing a dozen town guards.  
Throwing in rules that added something like realistic chances of dieing from a fall, while they may have modelled the reality of falling excellently, totally miss the point.

[Snowden]

So it seems that your label of "heartbreaker" is based on ignorance and/or one-true-wayism on the part of the purchaser. i.e. This hypothetical cave-dwelling purchaser apparently has his heart set that any game which has rayguns or spaceships should try to emulate the specific qualities of literary science fiction in the style of Dick and Asimov. Thus games like Half-Life, Starfarers of Catan, and Traveller are all heartbreakers to him.

If anything, it's the opposite since many game designers and players seem to assume that games like the ones you mention (which are inspired by non-speculative, world-building sci-fi source material) are representative of "science fiction" as a whole.  Pointing this out is hardly one-true-wayism; it's a simple fact that regardless of what you think of it this style of sci-fi is extremely overrepresented in RPGs while other styles (which are at least as prominent in the source literature) are practically non-existent.

I think that using, for example, the fact that these games depict what today looks like Science Fantasy or Space Opera as a categorizing factor in the Heartbreaker definition is like condemning secret agent games (Top Secret, James Bond, MS&PI, etc.) for not doing Horror and Romance genres as well--or, perhaps, for not presenting quite enough post cold-war cynicism for the modern reader.

I think this is a good analogy, although not for the reasons you've raised it!  Like "science fiction RPGs," most of those "secret agent RPGs" focus pretty narrowly on one specific segment of the source material: James Bond, with maybe a hint of Mission: Impossible.  There is a huge body of espionnage fiction (LeCarre, Deighton) that is almost totally ignored by a gaming industry that continually repeats the assumptions that espionnage games must have gadgets and fighting and chases.

I also think it would be really helpful to drop the "hard/soft" issue here, because it's a red herring.  As you've pointed out, using hindsight to pick apart older games' scientific assumptions isn't constructive, and doesn't really tell us anything important about the games themselves.  Similarly, I think "space opera" has pejorative implications for some readers and I would vote for leaving it out of a detailed discussion.  I think "speculative fiction" and "world-building fiction" would be better labels for the two extremes (i.e. Asimov vs. Lucas).

The fact that you want narrativist games and these are not those do not make these heartbreakers. There has to be another basis for that.

This is a fair point, but is it possible to address Dick, Asimov, Scheckley, Bradbury, Ballard, etc. any other way?  If a significant segment of the genre demands narrativist treatment, wouldn't games that endlessly repeat simulationist assumptions that only work for a different segment of the genre be eligible for heartbreaker status?  For the record, though, I don't think this is a narr/sim issue at all.  In fact, I'd be curious to hear more about your Multiverser experience, which sounds like you were taking a sim approach to speculative, short story-based sci-fi!

[NN]

I suspect its easier to reconcile the different demands of G, N and S in a 'fantasy' game than in a 'sci-fi' game.

[contracycle]

Science fiction is about setting. It is used as a setting to tell stories. They can be love stories like Happy Accidents, mysteries like Minority Report, light-heared adventures like Flight of the Navigator, comic adventures like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, comedies like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or The Ice Pirates, thrillers like Alien. It's not required that it deal with issues to be science fiction. It is required that it involve some extrapolation of future technology or science as part of the setting. I've read some Larry Niven, and although I haven't read much and I did enjoy what I read, I never encountered anything that seemed like it had great literary value in this sense. It seemed to be about gadgets and how they might impact our future lives, but as a backdrop for telling stories that might otherwise have happened without the gadgets, just a bit differently.

No.  If those stories could have happened without those particular gadgets, in a setting other than that specifically bounded by the technology of the setting, then it is not SF.  As I have quoted, SF is specifically about the impact of technology on the human experience.  If you are telling a story to whch the technology is irrelevant, then it is not SF - it is just using a futurisitc setting.

I keep seeing this recurring idea that science fiction is only the stuff that has literary merit, and I have yet to see anyone on this thread demonstrate that this is not what is meant. A science fiction game does not have to produce such stories to be a good science fiction game. The fact that you want narrativist games and these are not those do not make these heartbreakers. There has to be another basis for that.

I think you are confusing the "issue" with narratavism to no purpose.   The fact that the human impac of technology in SF is what underlies the human story does not alter the centrality of that technology as a defining feature of the genre.  Narrativism may be an outcome of play but that is not necessarily the case - perfectly good gamist outcomes can be had just by playing with travel systems, for example. Wanting the SF game to contain such a technological issue does not imply that the game must be narratavist address of premise.

[daMoose_Neo]

If you are telling a story to whch the technology is irrelevant, then it is not SF - it is just using a futurisitc setting.

Yupper doodle.
Hence my insistance on
1) Defining, in the heartbreaker list, just what constitutes a science fiction and
2) questioning the need for an SF Heartbreaker concept, when really the only thing the vast majority of these games are addressing is setting. And if thats all they address, Ron's original HB essay is still a perfectly good guideline, tweaking out the ideas that maybe it was Traveller who is the granddaddy as opposed to D&D (my hat's in the ring for D&D, but thats me~)

And agreed too- you could pull off Gamest and Sim within the bounds of the sci-fi archetype. Minority Report was an awesome action/mystery flick. the SFX were slick, the story rather suspenceful, you didn't know what was happening. And it still asked the questions. "Is it right to punish people for things they *may* have done?" and a common one in "Is the technology we rely on 100% proven? At what is an acceptable margin of error?" At some point, for a brief instant (or a couple of points for breif instances), the group may have to touch on Nar, but it still can be done.
And too, look at quite a few of your classic Trek shows. Many of them, in their own way, tackle some issues central to technology and humanity.
When you look at them though, the Alien flicks (do really enjoy them, btw) are stylish slasher flicks in space, just as easily recreated here on Earth with the likes of Scream. You have a killer (Alien), slowly picking off members of the crew. An RPG based around Alien (or Predator) wouldn't need something built for it to handle science fiction, just a slight retooling of a system that handled Horror well. Even something for the movie rendition for Minority Report could be cobbled together from a system that handled some harrowing action and mystery elements.
So, if Multiverser can do Science Fiction and Fantasy without batting an eye, GURPs can pretty much do the same, and a host of Space games developed for d20 (D&D), where are the game mechanic differences between what fantasy and science fiction need if not the framework of sci-fi literature instead of fantasy epic?

[Snowden]

If you are telling a story to whch the technology is irrelevant, then it is not SF - it is just using a futurisitc setting.

On the face of it, this definition would appear to exclude a lot of things that are commonly accepted as "science fiction" (Star Wars and Trek, Dune, Martian Chronicles, Childhood's End, a good chunk of Heinlein, the Alien franchise, Niven, and every non-"cyberpunk" SFPRG I can think of including Traveller), because they either don't feature technology as a prominent element, or use it only as color to amplify and embellish a story that could have been told without it.

I'm probably reading this definition as more strict than it was intended to be...could you clarify what you mean by "technology" and "irrelevant"?

[Marco]

I think there are a few different issues at work here:

1. A lot of the Science Fiction that has really *impacted* me has used science or ideas from science in its construction to greatly engage and excite me intellectually. This is, IMO, the benefit of having actual science in SF.

RPG Application: Traveler has a certain science-based approach to starship travel and technology (the use of guns, for example, since they haven't become less deadly with the advent of lasers). This, to me, gave me some intellectually exciting elements to the game and drew me to it.

This improved the game for me and it would've been weaker, IMO, with out it.

2. What I connected with on a dramatic level (human-experience, pathos, etc.) was usually not directly connected to the science per-se.

RPG Application: The presence of what I think would be Narrativist style Premise was extant, when it was extant, in situation. In fiction, IMO, this is largely character-centric and while science may play a role (a robot wishes to become human) the fundamental element is the human-experience connection we have with events that transpire.

3. It is certainly possible to play "Star Knights of the Round Asteroid" wherein horses are exchanged for fighters and swords for blasters and King Arthur for 'High Counsel Arthur'--and the author makes zero attempt to use science (1) as an element.

I have some sympathy for saying this isn't 'Science Fiction'--but like the Hacker-Cracker argument (some people get really upset when you refer to computer intrusion black hats as Hackers) I think the war has already been lost. In terms of clear communication, a book with space-fighters will be recognized as Sience Fiction by most people. You can call it Science Fantasy if you want (people are usually okay with that too) but most bookstores don't have a Science Fantasy section.

In terms of clear communication, the look and feel of a setting makes it science fiction moreso than the quality of its ideas (and can you call Star Wars futuristic when it is explicitly set long, long ago?)

RPG Application: The blanket term of Science Fiction, outside of specific, contraversial interpertations of the term, is broad enough to cover anything with spaceships and aliens and rayguns. Demanding that the game should call itself, say, Science Fantasy in order to satisfy, for instance, Asimov is, IMO, a bit Quixotic.

4. Most stories fall between the hard-science absolute reality of whatever we are going to consider "Science Fiction" and the clearly transformed King-Author myth set in space.

Alien, for instance has similarities to Scream--but when Ash turns out to be an android, how does that translate? There is no exact analogue. People on a ship at sea being hunted by a tiger would still not be an exact duplicate--some of the elements (androids, cold sleep, alien spaceships) are simply impossible to duplicate without an advanced level of technology.

RPG Application: Transhuman Space is, IMO, pretty clearly "about the technology" but Star Frontiers which, IMO, is not, still allows some of those SF elements which may not inspire us as per (1) but, as per (4) allow stories that are still pretty clearly reasonable Science Fiction.

NOTE: I think that being overly picky about what role science plays is missing the forest for the trees. Many of the powerful books (or movies or games) that are reasonably in the SF genre do have a few excellent scientific ideas and some really good human-experience stuff may very much be stronger on one than the other. I found Asimov's Foundation striking for it's innovations in political and social science, not technology.

The telepaths of the Second Foundation were closer to mysticism: but the grandeur of a failing pan-galactic empire was, IMO, pretty awe-worthy and relied on a futuristic background to exist (even though the science to create the empire was not in the foreground of the stories).

-Marco